Századok – 2016
2016 / 4. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Krász Lilla: Orvosok a hivatal szolgálatában a 18. századi Magyarországon
870 KRÁSZ LILLA MEDICS IN OFFICIAL SERVICE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY HUNGARY by Krász Lilla Abstract The administrative measures of a comprehensive reform program introduced in Vienna, the centre of the Habsburg Monarchy, as well as in some regions located at significant distances from the centre itself should be deemed as a successful field of practice in relation to the considerable shifts taking momentum in Habsburg governance from the 1780s on. Physicians thus were compelled to gather reliable information on all kinds of medical issues arising in their daily practices in the different countries of the Habsburg Empire as well as subsequently having to process and arrange them in accordance with a previously set system of aspects communicated to them. Regular and specific information gathering, including their systematic processing with the help of various as well as changing media of visualisation in time, i. e. running texts, lists, tables, thereby made it possible for the central government to accumulate, filter, assess their contents and duly contribute to making stances and decisions on the basis of available and relevant information, normally brief, factual, concrete, topical and synoptic, in the Imperial ’information centres’ such as the Chancery, the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna, or in the regional ones such the Council of Governor-General and the medical faculties of the University of Nagyszombat [presently Trnava, Slovakia], Buda and Pest. This paper is meant to reconstruct the process of making a network of health administration during the reigns of Maria Theresa and Joseph II in the light of their political, socio-cultural and epistemological contexts as well as trying to elucidate the strengths and deficiencies of its actual functioning.
